


Reasons to Believe

by squirenonny



Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: 31 Days of Sadfic, AU, CFSWF, F/F, WoR spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-03
Updated: 2015-07-03
Packaged: 2018-04-07 02:17:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4245711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squirenonny/pseuds/squirenonny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jasnah is not dead.</p>
<p>Shallan doesn’t know how she knows this, but she feels it deep down, in that visceral corner of her soul that holds her Memory. No matter what she saw, no matter the blood, the knife, the body… Shallan knows better.</p>
<p>(5 reasons to believe Jasnah is alive + 1 reason to know she’s not)</p>
<p>Written for CFSWF 2015</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reasons to Believe

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brightnessdavar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brightnessdavar/gifts).



**1.**

“She’s a Radiant,” Shallan whispers, huddled in the back of the converted slaver’s wagon. She holds her sketchpad and draws. She has no Memory of Jasnah, but every detail of the older woman’s face is carved into her mind.

Pattern hums, spinning small circles on the corner of the page. She senses him watching the motion of her pen, the way it traces the curl of Jasnah’s hair, the sharp angles of her jaw.

“She’s a Radiant. She can’t die just like that. A-a _knife_? Radiants are more than that, aren’t they?”

“I…do not know.” Pattern curls tighter on himself, his shifting lines pressed so close together it looks like Shallan spilled her ink on the page. “I do not understand death. Jasnah is…gone?”

“No,” Shallan snaps, gripping her pen so hard she tears a hole in the page. Grimacing, she lifts the pen away and takes a deep breath. “She’s _not_ ‘gone,’ Pattern.”

“But she is not here.” He buzzes, a wordless question.

“She…” Shallan hesitates, looking down at her sketch. It looks very much like Jasnah. An untrained eye might call it a perfect likeness.

Shallan sees every flaw. Her hair is too loose, her hands too soft. The smile is all wrong.

And there’s something else missing, some spark in her eye that Shallan doesn’t know how to capture without her Memory.

Sighing, Shallan crumples the page and tosses it aside. She starts again on the next page, ignoring Pattern as he reappears on her skirt, writhing in irritation, or perhaps confusion.

“Jasnah is gone,” she admits. “But she’s not dead.”

“There is a difference? But I thought… Why do you say she’s gone when you mean she’s dead?”

_I don’t_ , Shallan wants to say. Instead, she holds her breath until she can trust her voice. “It’s something people do, Pattern. It’s too hard to say someone is dead, so we soften it. If someone is dead, that’s it. The end. If they’re only _gone_ … they can come back.”

* * *

**2.**

“There was no body.”

It’s the wrong thing to say the first time she meets Jasnah’s family, but the words tumble out of her in a rush. Highprince Dalinar stiffens, Adolin goes white, and Navani—

Navani’s eyes flare with outrage.

Sensing a coming storm, Dalinar steps in. “Thank you for…” He glances at Navani. “Thank you for telling us what happened.”

Shallan wants to squeeze her eyes shut, rewind the conversation and try again. Maybe start the day over and not come here at all. Avoid Dalinar’s insufferable darkeyed guard captain, meet Jasnah’s family somewhere more private.

“No,” she says. “That’s not what I—”

“You’ve said quite enough, I think.” Navani’s voice is not exactly cold, but her eyes are a match for the sea off the Frostlands coast.

_This isn’t how this is supposed to go_ , Shallan thinks, shrinking back. “I-I just meant.” Navani shoots her another glare, but this time Shallan doesn’t cower. _An illusion of power_. Her spine straightens, and she meets Navani’s gaze coolly. “I don’t believe your daughter is dead. In fact, I’m certain she’s alive.”

* * *

**3.**

“We can enter Shadesmar.”

They are in Sebarial’s warcamp now, safe from Navani’s wounded rage, from Dalinar’s tight-lipped dismissal. Adolin listened to her, she thinks. She’s not sure he believes that Jasnah is alive, but at least he doesn’t think she’s doing this to be spiteful.

“Isn’t that right, Pattern? When I was trying to Soulcast, it was as though I was…halfway between. One foot here, one in Shadesmar. Couldn’t Jasnah have stepped through?”

Pattern, for once, is silent.

Shallan purses her lips. “It would explain why there was no body. Why would the assassins move it? If she was really dead—”

For a moment, Shallan is back on the _Wind’s Pleasure_. She sees Jasnah, bloodied, limp, thrown to the floor. Sightless eyes, once full of life and warmth, pierce her. A knife flashes, enters Jasnah’s chest. The thud of blade against the wood underneath jolts Shallan out of the memory.

“Why would they have moved the body?”

Pattern hums sadly, but Shallan knows she’s right. Jasnah survived, and carried herself to Shadesmar. It’s the only answer.

* * *

**4.**

“She knew the assassins were coming,” Shallan tells Adolin over wine. Adolin’s guards stand far enough away for privacy, but she doesn’t care if they hear. It feels as though the rest of the world has accepted Jasnah’s death and moved on.

It feels as if everyone else has already forgotten her.

Adolin spins his wine glass, looking distinctly uncomfortable. “She knew she was picking up assassins in—where was it?”

“Amydlatn,” Shallan says. “And obviously she didn’t know _who_ the assassins were. They never would have made it off the docks if she had.”

“I should hope not.” Adolin drains his glass and signals for another. It’s only orange wine, and Shallan suspects he is hoping enough glasses can add up to one violet. Or ten.

She’s fond of Adolin, truly she is. Usually. He makes her laugh, and he doesn’t hate her the way Navani seems to. Under different circumstances, she might have even been excited about the prospect of marrying him.

But every time she brings up Jasnah he turns sour and tries to change the subject.

“Jasnah knew someone wanted her dead. They’d tried before—there was an ardent in Kharbranth, Kabsal.” She nearly flushes at the memory, and forces her mind back onto Jasnah. “Even at sea, she would have been ready for anything. She wouldn’t have let them kill her so easily.”

“But they did,” Adolin says.

The words hit Shallan like a slap. Adolin’s eyes widen, and he hastens to apologize, to try to take it back, but the words are out there.

Everyone else thinks she’s dead.

Why is Shallan the only one who hasn’t abandoned her? 

* * *

 

**5.**

“She wouldn’t leave me.”

The highstorm has passed, but Shallan and Kaladin remain in their crevice, pressed against each other, shivering in their cold, wet, tattered clothes. He offers her some warmth, but all Shallan can think is that Jasnah’s arms around her would be warmer.

Kaladin says nothing.

“We were coming here together,” Shallan says, talking just to hear her own voice. She has told Kaladin everything else. Almost everything. Things no one else but Pattern knows. Not Adolin, not Gaz or Vathah.

Not even Jasnah knew what she has just told Kaladin.

The storm is over, but she can’t leave until she tells him this. Maybe he will believe her where the others don’t.

“I was her ward, and she was teaching me to—” To Soulcast. To be a Radiant. Her last secret, or nearly so. She can’t make herself say it, not yet. “She was showing me how to be a scholar. She set up the betrothal to Adolin. She wouldn’t just _leave_ me. She knows how much I need her.”

_Needed her_ , a corner of her mind argues. Shallan pushes it away. She has learned much since the attack on the _Wind’s Pleasure._ Illusions and Veil and the Ghostbloods… She’s not a Radiant yet, not really, but she doesn’t need Jasnah’s instruction as much now, except maybe with Soulcasting.

(Or maybe she’s just holding back there, so Jasnah will still have something to teach her when she returns.)

But she needs Jasnah still. Needs her _more_ , maybe, if in different ways.

“She can’t be dead,” she says, and is ashamed at how her voice breaks. “She can’t have left me alone.”

Kaladin holds her, and doesn’t argue. 

* * *

 

**+1.**

“I have to find her.”

She says this standing on the shore where she washed up so long ago. So long she’s afraid to count the days. It was easy, at first, to ignore that empty time. Jasnah was healing. She had found something to study in Shadesmar. She was finding her way home.

The first anniversary was the first time she thought that maybe Jasnah wasn’t coming home.

It’s been longer still. Long enough that Shallan has her Plate as well as her Blade, that she’s as good a Soulcaster as Jasnah ever was, that she’s even met a few other Lightweavers.

Those who knew Jasnah speak of her in the past tense. Those who didn’t—Kaladin, Lift, Gaz and Vathah—try not to speak of her at all. Shallan has stopped insisting she’s alive, at least where anyone but Pattern can hear.

He has stopped telling her not to lie to herself.

A part of her knows what she’ll find, if she finds anything at all, but she comes anyway. To the shore where she once tried to Soulcast fire, as close as she can come on her own two feet to where she last saw Jasnah.

“You aren’t supposed to do this,” Pattern whispers as she takes in Stormlight. “Soulcasting opens a door to Shadesmar, but you aren’t supposed to go through.”

“I know,” Shallan says. Straddling two Realms comes easily now, after all her practice. She holds two views in her mind. Two shorelines washed by two kinds of waves, one water, one spheres. They move in opposite directions, bleeding through each other around her ankles.

Pattern doesn’t try to stop her. She steps through, dropping onto the hard-packed black ground of Shadesmar, and Pattern is there in his humanoid form to catch her. He says nothing, but hums sadly, faintly, as she starts walking.

She walks, and he follows.

Hours pass.

“Will she be…?” Shallan stops, unable to finish the question. Her throat is dry, her lips sticky from not talking for—what? Ten miles? More? “If there’s something there, a-a body, will it be…?”

“The body is of the Physical Realm,” Pattern says softly. Shallan almost laughs. When she still believed, Pattern wouldn’t have understood what she meant. So long ago now. “In the Cognitive Realm, it will remain unchanged unless she wills it to, no matter how much time passes.”

Shallan closes her eyes, not breaking stride. Perfectly preserved. It may be a blessing, next to the alternative, but it doesn’t feel like one.

It takes days, searching with no landmarks to navigate by and no clear idea where the _Wind’s Pleasure_ went down. Shallan refuses to give up. Maybe once she would have hoped to find nothing, would have believed that Jasnah had survived and gone elsewhere. Maybe, deep down, she still hopes.

But she stopped believing long ago.

She’s stopped counting days when she sees a bundle of cloth in the distance. Pattern slows as Shallan’s dragging steps turn into a stuttering run. She doesn’t want to see this, but she can’t stop herself. She needs to know.

Everything is the same. The hole in her chest, the blood on her dress. Those wide, sightless eyes. Shallan drops to her knees beside the body, reaching out a trembling hand.

It looks very much like Jasnah. The curl of her hair, let down for sleep, the hard lines of her jaw. But her smile is gone, along with the spark in her eye Shallan will never again capture in Memory.

Shallan crumples, clinging to Jasnah’s corpse until five years’ hoarded tears run dry.


End file.
